Page:Bobbie, General Manager (1913).djvu/174

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164
BOBBIE, GENERAL MANAGER

took four horses to drag it up to old Silas Morton's. Silas Morton is a farmer up near Sag Hill and he bought my sacred temple for fifteen dollars. He uses it for a hen-house! It seemed to me like sacrilege, but the hens laid eggs in it, Mr. Morton said, as if they were possessed. The upper part of the window-panes in the cupola are made of yellow stained-glass, and he thinks—Silas Morton is kind of an inventor—that the hens have an idea it's sunshine and that spring is coming. I tell him the cupola is inspired. I saw a picture once of a common little farmhouse where Mrs. Eddy wrote her book, "Science and Health." If my book were to be published, and some photographer took a picture of the house in which I wrote it, I guess that old hen-coop would win the prize for an odd spot in which to have an inspiration.

With the cupola gone and the French roof entirely obliterated, the iron fence and the iron fountain sold to a junk man, a spreading porte-cochère at one side of the house, a billiard-room at the other, low verandas like a wide brim to a hat surrounding the entire structure, and everything painted a bright yellow trimmed with green, you never in this world would recognise 240 Main Street, once brown and square and ugly. There's a new stable a quarter of a mile back of the house; there are lawns where the vegetable garden used to be; the old apple orchard is now a sunken garden with a pool in the centre. As I write I can hear the trickle of a stream of water that spouts out of the little artificial pond, and catch the prosperous sound of the hum of a lawn-mower run by a motor. The name that Edith has chosen to give